Did anyone here see Newsnight last week when it featured an item on whether English (or a Teutonic predecessor) was spoken in Britain in Iron Age Britain. There was an archaeologist called Win Scutt who presented the idea based on English place-names relating to water features in the upper Thames region. He took the names to refer to a lake, but then pointed out that there was a Roman road cutting through the area. He argued that if there was a Roman feature going over a dried up lake, then the place-names referring to it must be pre-Roman.
Newsnight didn't seem to take it very seriously and the whole piece was quite tongue-in-cheek (with Cornish poets, Druids / Bards and a drunken Welsh bloke in a pub who wanted to sing - no, not me.)
Yes, I caught that & wanted to know more. It made sense to me that if the trade routes went up the West Coast or across the Channel/North Sea, then they may well have been 2 different groups of people populating Britain.
I thought that the Anglo Saxon "Invasion & Elimination" theory had been rejected these days in favour of a sustained immigration over a century or soanyway!
I'm sure that the trade route idea has cropped up many times before, hasn't it? I'm pretty sure that Barry Cunliffe covers it in his "Facing the Ocean" book.
As for the "Invasion & Elimination" theory (has a certain ring to it) I don't think that it has been accepted by all. Didn't Francis Pryor, in his Britain AD programme, end up having to agree to disagree with Heinrich Harke? I'm not totally convinced.
This topic has been the subject of quite a lot of discussion on Britarch in the last few days. It can be viewed by going to http://www.britarch.ac.uk and then following the link to britarch mailing list
Thanks Jonathan. I had been following the 'discussion' on Britarch, but I didn't find the tone of it all very inviting. A lot of the DNA and linguistic aspects were going over my head. It has, however, prompted me to start reading Oppenheimer's book. I remember the article in Prospect last year, and that whilst I found it difficult to accept completely there were aspects that I would like to understand more fully.
I was pretty certain I'd seen you post on there in the past so I'd guessed you were aware of it, but I was also thinking to alert others to it.
I can understand your comments as a number of the people posting on the thread have written styles that don't come across particularly well! It's a subject I'd like to know more about but at my current rate of progress I won't get there for a number of years and so I agree with your comments as to the complexity as it goes over my head as well. However the discussion shows that there seems to be at least some validity in Win Scutt's arguments and I thought that was worth alerting people to.
I'm a bit disappointed at the lack of contributions by Win Scutt himself. I realise that he may well be savaged by one britarch contributor, but on the whole the list seems to be quite prepared to listen to him.
One of the problems is the multi-discipline nature of the argument. I am still very wary of the links with genetics and linguistics. The language a person speaks is no indicator of genetic origins. My Great grandfather's first language was Welsh, mine is English - that doesn't mean a change in my DNA.
Have any of you come across "The History of Britain Revealed: The Shocking Truth About the English Language" I hadn't, until it came up on my Amazon site as a recommendation because I had bought Oppenhemer's book. The author is a Michael John Harper. I haven't heard of him. Is this book a serious work or a wind up? Is it similar to what Win Scutt is saying?
quote:
Book Description Think you know where the English language came from? Think again. This book is a truly original, blistering attack on the standard history of Britain and the origins of the English language.
In gloriously sharp prose, M.J. Harper destroys the cherished national myths of the English, the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and – to demonstrate his lack of national bias – the French. He shows that:
• Most of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary are wrong. • The whole of British place-name theory is misconceived. • Latin is not what it seems. • The Anglo-Saxons played no major part in our history or language. • Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning but deluded academics.
Unsentimental and truly original, The History of Britain Revealed will change the way you think about the history of the United Kingdom and the origin of the English language. It is an essential but rarely comforting read for anyone who believes that history matters.
From the Back Cover Historians and archaeologists are competent enough in their own fields but where the two disciplines join in the half-life of pre-history, both sides find themselves out of their depth. M J Harper, in his latest work on the fracture-lines of academia, shows how the currently cherished national myths of the English, the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish--and to demonstrate his lack of national bias--the French, are hopelessly wrong. Why and how historians and archaeologists have aided and abetted in the forging of these myths is a consistent theme throughout the book.
He also, in passing, points out that most of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary are wrong, the whole of place-name theory is misconceived, etymological linguistics is barking up the wrong evolutionary tree, the role of the Church in the Dark Ages is the exact opposite of that which is normally claimed for it, Latin is not what it seems, both Old English and Middle English are imaginary academic artefacts, and generally draws attention to the various inanities that have become received wisdom over the years.
The History of Britain Revealed will be read with mounting horror by all self-respecting academics and with perplexed fascination by the general public.
Originally posted by Steffan: Did anyone here see Newsnight last week when it featured an item on whether English (or a Teutonic predecessor) was spoken in Britain in Iron Age Britain.
One of those questions which will probably never be answered.
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Originally posted by Steffan: I had been following the 'discussion' on Britarch, but I didn't find the tone of it all very inviting. A lot of the DNA and linguistic aspects were going over my head.
But then, since these embody most of the evidence that were used to support the proposed idea, surely they have to be discussed to test the theory? How is it to be assessed while not discussing them?
Originally posted by AJ ap: If everything is wrong, who taught the bloke that wrote it?
Aaah. It is all down to Applied Epistemology .
AH!!!! You mean guesswork.
You might well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.
The M.J. Harper book that you're dicussing certainly deserves looking at more carefully because if only part of what he says is true then we're going to have to seriously re-think the way we see the past. The geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer is also proposing that something akin to English was spoken here before the Romans arrived.
The book's main thesis is remarkably simple and I'll try to give you a flavour of the evidence that is being proposed. Harper argues that modern English cannot have derived from the Anglo-Saxon language. Written Anglo-Saxon disappears with the Norman Conquest. Around 1400, when English starts to be written down, it is in the form of Middle English, which is modern English spelt differently. Therefore, Anglo-Saxon was a different language which was spoken by an elite of Anglo-Saxon warriors. When the Normans invaded the language perished with that warrior elite. The second piece of evidence is Scotland. The Anglo-Saxons only colonised the south-east of the country, yet English is spoken throughout the country as Lallan Scots and Doric in the north east. The problem is that we don't know what the natives spoke because the elite, whether Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish or Norman wrote in their own languages. Only when English is finally written down can we be sure what the natives are speaking and then we have to account for how a few thousand invading warriors can change the language of millions of native inhabitants. Then there's the bit about how modern English shares so many words with the French but I'll leave that until next time...
The M.J. Harper book that you're dicussing certainly deserves looking at more carefully because if only part of what he says is true then we're going to have to seriously re-think the way we see the past.
Well, I've not read the book but if it's written in a "let's bash the establishment" style as Steffan has indicated in this thread, does he really deserve to be taken seriously?
Interesting theories, and I'm all for established views being given a nose tweaking every now and then, but the arguements should be properly thought out and presented scientifically.
The M.J. Harper book that you're dicussing certainly deserves looking at more carefully because if only part of what he says is true then we're going to have to seriously re-think the way we see the past.
Well, I've not read the book but if it's written in a "let's bash the establishment" style as Steffan has indicated in this thread, does he really deserve to be taken seriously?
Interesting theories, and I'm all for established views being given a nose tweaking every now and then, but the arguements should be properly thought out and presented scientifically.
The prose has been described as 'corrosive' but to what and whom is really the issue. I am trying to judge the arguments on their merits. The fact that the author bashes the establishment is incidental to the validity of the arguments that he is articulating and they are certainly 'properly thought out and scientifically presented'.
The original Newsnight piece to which Steffan refers doesn't mention Harper by name but it did show his book. You can download the piece on Win Scutt's website.
What intrigues me is the way that Scutt's archaeology, Oppenheimer's take on the antiquity of English being spoken in Britain and Harper's critique of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English all hang together so nicely. The Newsnight piece seemed to capture that flavour so keenly.
Originally posted by Vlad the Impala: what language did the Germanic people used by the Roman military speak?
We don't know until they start to write it down. Tacitus, in Germania, calls the tribes beyond the Rhine 'Germans' and when they did start to write in something other than Latin then we call it German. I would imagine Anglo-Saxon units spoke Anglo-Saxon but we don't know because they didn't write it down.
Its not technically correct to refer to "Anglo-Saxon units" in the Roman army, and germanic auxiliaries would hardly be speaking "Anglo-Saxon" until that language emerged.
Originally posted by PMB: Its not technically correct to refer to "Anglo-Saxon units" in the Roman army, and germanic auxiliaries would hardly be speaki
I actually manged to successfully edit a post on this wretched excuse for a forum!